If you’re on a team or a project where you need to collaborate with other people, Google Drive is the first place most people turn. And while Google Docs is often the tool of choice, Google Drive offers so much more.

You can change the view to 3D mode and spin it round to get a better feel of how the room layout will look from a real-world perspective.

When you’ve come up with your first draft room layout, share it with a friend by going to dashboard view, and under Actions, clicking on Copy to user.

This give you the ability to email the floor design to your roommate, and let them play around with it for a while before sending it back to you to review.

Taking such an approach to planning the layout of a dorm room, bedroom, or an entire house, has the potential of avoiding some massive arguments. Seriously, I think maybe floor planning is one of the top reasons for divorce these days… That, and leaving the toilet seat up.

When you’ve created a first-draft mind map, you have a couple of options to share it out to your business partners. One method of sharing from right inside MindMup is to use the Share menu option and then selecting Publish to Share or Embed.

The one drawback of this is that the free account won’t allow you to publish mind maps. Also, this feature is meant to publish mind maps to the public. If you’re developing a business plan, making it public is a problem.

The better option is to click on Save button, and then select the Google Drive option.

Once you have your MindMup map added to your Google Drive account, you can share it out and collaborate on it with others in the same way as with WeVideo above. Just share that file with your business partners on Google Drive, and you’re good to go.

Project Management for Teams

If there’s anything that a project manager needs to be good at, it’s working with teams. You’re always prompting a team member on the status of their work, or reminding someone else when they’re late.

This process is easier when the whole team has access to the project plan and can see the relevant dates. One of the best tools for this, available in Google Drive, is Gantter.

You’ll notice from inside Gantter that the Share option is grayed out, so you can’t share the plan directly from inside the tool itself. Again, since this is available from Google Drive, you do have the option to save your project plan to Google Drive from the same menu.

Once you’ve done this, all you have to do is highlight the file in Google Drive, and click the Share button as you have with the other tools in this article. Make sure that you allow “edit” permissions when you add the email addresses to share to.

Once shared, your team members will have a copy of this project plan in their own Google Drive account. It’s the perfect way to make sure the whole team is updated and on board with the latest version of your project plan.

Google Forms lets you design an entry form in a matter of minutes, and with that form you can collect opinions, information and data from large groups of people. We use it frequently at MakeUseOf to collect staff feedback, to collaborate in editorial, and sometimes even to get reader feedback.

To create such a form, just create any Google Sheet, go to the Tools menu, and select Create a form.

Once you’ve created your form, the sheet is already prepared to start collecting input. No additional work is required on your part. It’s all integrated and automated. All you have to do is share out the form like you would any other file in Google Drive.

With Google Forms you can even embed the form onto a web page for ease of access.

Just keep in mind that if you plan to accept input from the general public using a web page, you’ll need to make sure you’ve shared out the form to the Public, and not only a limited number of people.

Collaborating with Google Drive

Without a doubt, Google Drive is an ideal environment to collaborate with people. The apps above are some of the most popular and powerful tools that people are using these days to work on team projects, but almost anything you create in Google Drive — documents, spreadsheets, drawings and more — can be shared with a team of people in real time.

This is the beauty of a world where so much work is being accomplished in the cloud. Collaboration with others is easier and simpler than ever.

Do you collaborate with others using Google Drive? What are your favorite tools, and how have you used them? Share your ideas and tips in the comments section below.

The two products are based on the same idea, but MindMup actually gets it right and foregoes all the frippery in design, instead opting for raw functionality - and Google Drive / RealTime API integration.

Ryan has a BSc degree in Electrical Engineering. He's worked 13 years in automation engineering, 5 years in IT, and now is an Apps Engineer. A former Managing Editor of MakeUseOf, he's spoken at national conferences on Data Visualization and has been featured on national TV and radio.